


Rachel

by Potterology



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Death, Gen, mother/daughter - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-12
Updated: 2012-12-12
Packaged: 2017-11-20 22:39:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/590438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Potterology/pseuds/Potterology
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam suspects this may be the first time her daughter is seeing Secretary Carter in action, not just her mom having a bad day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rachel

President Walker, a thin man with kind eyes and a hard-ass exterior, to his credit manages to contain a huff of annoyance as his cabinet meeting is interrupted for the third time. A fresh-faced, barely-old-enough-to-grow-stubble intern pokes his head around the door, nervously chewing his lip, and stutters out an apology.

“There’s an urgent message for Secretary Carter, sir.” Walker sits back low in his chair, his eyebrows raised and his fingers steepled. Sam shrugs, looking helplessly between the President and the intern, who is practically wetting himself. The President nods to the boy and beckons him in, one hand flicking in a ‘well?’ gesture.

“Um, sorry ma’am, it’s your daughter,” he says, stepping into the room shyly, his eyes cast downward, then upward, then towards the window, anywhere but the now tense and alert Secretary of Defence.

“Is she okay? What’s going on?” Sam is clearly trying to remain calm, but is still just this side of panicking.

“Um, well, ma’am--”

“Spit it out, kiddo.” It is then that Sam realises Walker is no longer reclining, he is ramrod straight, staring intently at the shuffling young man. To be expected. When he was still a Senator and Sam still a General, their respective children were friends. It had been at one of these play-dates, nearly nine years ago, that Walker had asked Sam if she was interested in the Secretary of Defence position.

The intern blushes, slightly sheepish as he ‘spits it out’. “Your daughter’s been arrested.” The entire room is silent for a good minute before Sam asks him to clarify. “Well, uh, the details are a little unclear, but, uh, there was a protest downtown this afternoon, and Rachel was taken into police custody about an hour ago. They’re pressing charges.”

“You’re kidding.” Sam is slightly baffled. Rachel had been used against her many times in political bullshit ads - anarchist, protester, PETA persona that she was - but such a line had never been crossed. Most had the sense to back off before garnering too much White House heat.

“Last time I checked, son, protesting was not against the law.,” Walker says evenly. He was unusually hard to read lately, and it wasn’t because he was fast approaching his final days as President.

The intern winces. “She resisted arrest. I, uh, believe there was some tasing involved.”

Sam closes her eyes at that, letting the anger wash over her for a moment before summoning every ounce of composure she has left in her body. Straining to remain diplomatic in a room full of Very Important People, she dismisses the intern and makes a non-committal noise in the back of her throat when asked if she needed to leave. Walker doesn’t make a fuss when she quietly storms out of the briefing room, but does arrange for her to be escorted to the precinct where Rachel is in holding. If there is a problem, he wants to make sure his name is nothing less than bandied about.

The precinct is buzzing, a bizarre contrast of neatly pressed uniforms and bedraggled eco-warriors. A lot of paperwork is flying around, none more so than for Rachel O’Neill. Sam storms through the bullpen, flanked by six or seven Secret Service agents, and is led directly to the interrogation room where Rachel is handcuffed to the underside of a metal table. A fit, muscular but greying detective follows Sam into the room, pulls her chair out for her and situates himself against a corner, thoroughly enjoying himself. Sam eyes him but he doesn’t look malicious. Years of dealing with foreign entities (yes, she says entities, because not everything in the universe comes in a neat and tidy humanoid form) have finely honed her evaluative skills, so for now the detective stays.

“So,” she begins. Rachel has the decency to at least look like she’s sorry, but it is not very convincing. “Animal rights? Union bill? Gender equality? Stop me if I’m close.” Rachel rolls her eyes, but looks somewhat cowed once she realises Sam isn’t reprimanding her per se, but she is less than pleased.

“Defence spending, actually.” And that’s somewhat self-explanatory. Tensions have been building again lately between the US and Russia, and despite the upcoming treaty summit, the nuclear budget had skyrocketed. Sam didn’t necessarily agree with the path she had been ordered on, but Walker had been adamant it was necessary, to ‘reassure the public’. Rachel had scoffed at Sam over dinner that night.

“And? From what I understood, the protest was supposed to be peaceful. How does you waving a sign get you in lock-up?”

The detective answers from his corner. “She wasn’t just waving a sign, she assaulted a police officer.”

“Only because one of your drones got handsy! If he had just kept his hands on his doughnuts instead of my ass, we wouldn’t have had a problem,” Rachel snaps, a look of loathing in her piercing blue eyes. The long blonde hair that usually framed her face had been pulled back into a tight ponytail, making her look even more formidable than she would have normally been able to pull off. Sam sighs.

She attempts to mediate, “Okay, I think is getting a little out of hand.”

“Out of hand? With all due respect, ma’am, she broke a police officers nose in three places, we aren’t just going to brush that under the rug because her mommy thinks we’re being too harsh.” His tone is brash, impolite, and Sam is edgy and stressed enough to take offence.

She exhales, controlled, and allows the fury and frustration to bubble on the surface. “In my experience, detective, when someone starts a sentence ‘with all due respect’ it’s usually followed by something that indicates the exact opposite. Now, I don’t know whom you thought you were dealing with when I walked through that door, and perhaps I can forgive you for the lapse in judgement, but I am not some misguided soccer mom you can bully into a courtroom. If I tell you to bury this, then it will be buried; if I tell you to hand over the incident report, then you hand it over with a smile; and if I say jump, the next words out of your mouth had better be ‘how high?’ Am I being perfectly clear, detective?”

Rachel’s eyes widen comically. Sam suspects this may be the first time her daughter is seeing Secretary Carter in action, not just her mom having a bad day. The detective sputters for a response, but winds up limping out of the room, tail firmly between his legs. There is silence in the interrogation room until he returns, a formal discharge in his hand and a begrudging apology on his lips for wasting Sam’s time. The service agents escort them to the black sedan in the garage and the ride home is just as silent.

They have barely crossed the threshold when Sam breaks it first.

“Is this about your Dad?”

“What?” The question takes Rachel by surprise, and usually she would have chalked it up to some new tactic of her mothers, but there is no mistaking the exhaustion in Sam’s face. “No, of course not.”

“Then why is it that every time I turn around, you’re doing something that puts me in a position that not only makes me be the bad guy, but somehow manages to push you just that bit further away?” Such a candid question from her mother there has never been, and it throws her for a hell of a loop.

What do you say to something like that?

Floundering for an answer that is not lame and insufficient, she shrugs hopelessly.

“Forget it.” Sam pinches the bridge of her nose. “Just… Try not to punch anybody next time.”

“That’s it? No great big Samantha Carter speech that puts me in my place? No ‘I tell you to do something, you do it’ reprimands?” Rachel knows she shouldn’t push, but the teenage need to combat against her mother has yet to be successfully buried.

A slow moment goes by, then Sam answers tiredly, “Would it actually make a difference?”

And there doesn’t seem to be an answer to that. _No_ , probably, but that doesn’t mean Rachel didn’t want her to at least try.

“I think I’m done, Rach.” Another heavy sigh. “You’re obviously going to do what you want, so go ahead.”

A gaping canyon suddenly opens up between them and they may as well be standing on opposite sides of a football field, screaming just to be heard. Strange, Rachel never thought this would be a problem before. Her dad had always been the easy parent, the middle ground both mother and daughter went to when they believed the other was being unreasonable. Sam wanted her home by ten, Rachel wanted to stay out until two, so Jack talked his wife into eleven thirty and Rachel was offered eleven thirty or being grounded. He helped with the delegation of chores and the comforting of hurt feelings when clashes of opinion turned into all out war. For all their differences, they found common ground in loving the same man. Only, he wasn’t there anymore, and they had been forced into figuring out how to co-exist without blowing up at one another every five minutes.

It was only then that it occured to her that perhaps they were both feeling the sting.

Sam had turned away, now massaging the headache forming in her temples, and Rachel was frozen in place at the centre of the living room, mid-revelation. Things had been difficult since Jack had died, certainly, but she had been fairly self-absorbed when it came to the loss. All the little things he did for her or with her were suddenly, glaringly missing from her life and it was hard functioning without them. It hit her in bizarre, common places. The middle of a lecture, for instance, when she realised she’d never be able to discuss the days lesson with him on the phone later that night. There had not been a moment since her father’s death that she had thought for a second her mother might be experiencing the same thing.

“Do you miss him?” The question is out before she has a chance to stop it. A stilted, blank pause has her mother clearly blindsided, the mention of Jack still fairly new enough to make her wild with grief. 

“Of course.” 

“Me, too.”

It's going to take a long time before either of them really understands the other, but the canyon shrinks to a cavity and things start to repair. 


End file.
